Featuring commentary on educational technology from down in the trenches.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Summer Re-Creation

"Chillin" CC Photo by eviltwin

I've enjoyed making a classroom project one of my summer past times. This was something I could do on my terms and at the time of my choosing. Some teachers like to get completely get away, but if you keep an oar-in, consider refreshing with one of these resolutions or practices:

* If you use study guides in your discipline, try for an online hyperlinked guide that your students can access through a computer or hand-held. These guides are far richer than the paper sort and the experience will acquaint you with the reason that epub is the future of instructional resources.

* Do you make up assignment calendars? Supplement these or replace the paper ones with an online calendar accessible to students through their smart phones.

* Resolve to replace a text assignment with ann audio or video substitute (or make it an option). If you believe that meaningful communication can only be done via the written word, this might give you pause-- this showed me some of the talents and knowledge weak writers possessed and it was a nice break for me from "papers."

* Reflect back on the past semester and consider this: Was there a cohort of students in a course who did not respond to a given assignment. Filter out any fault you might rightfully place on them and then consider, might there be a multimedia approach to this group that would increase the buy-in?

* I teach with some colleagues who sneer at lecturing, and instead lead "discussions." I've lead many of these, myself. After a "good discussion" I was not likely to think about those kids who said nothing. Perhaps you can help assuage my guilt about this. Would you consider an online forum in place of the classroom variety?

* Fight the urge to despair about those kids who spend their time outside of the classroom, texting constantly (or gaming, or Facebooking). Instead, since you can't control this anyway, make it your mission to find out why this is happening. Is there any avenue you might take in terms of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude. Could you organize a picture or note sharing activity that might actually leverage their cell phones?

*Explore the Creative Commons. Resolve to set a good example for your students by attributing credit to all those fols who lisence their photos for your use with attribution through Flickr. Get started with Advanced Image Search at Yahoo. The next time you make slides, try this as a source for illustration. It's served the Drive-thru very well, indeed.